Converting CCFL lit LCD monitor to LED edge lit monitor

This post is a continuation of the previous post on repairing a Hanns G 19″ LCD monitor. The previous post explains opening up the monitor and moving the power supply outside the monitor.

In this post I will document the changes I made to convert the monitor to use ultra bright LEDs for lighting. Although the monitor is usable now, it is not bright enough. But then it is now very easy to replace the lights as needed.

As you look at the monitor screen I made two holes on the right hand side of it, one at the top corner and one at the bottom corner. These two holes went through the plastic bezel, the metal frame container, and finally the outside case. The two pictures below show these holes.

Bottom right corner

Top right corner

The original monitor had a glass (plastic) plate tightly packed with CCFL lights at the top and the bottom with the plastic bezel tightly holding it. Without the CCFL lights, the glass plate would freely fall to the bottom. I used two screws on each side to secure the glass plate in the center such that there is space at the top and the bottom for lights to slide in.

Top Screw

Bottom Screw

I took out two metal bands from a legal size hanging folder. They are long enough to span the entire length of the monitor (19″),

Metal Bands

Metal Bands

I bought 2 Flexible Side-Emitting LED Strips from http://www.ledssuperbright.com for $12.49 each plus $8 shipping. These were ultra bright white LEDs and with them I was able to use the monitor, but they were not bright enough. Strips were little longer than I needed, so I used an electrical tape to cover some of the LEDs.

LED light strip

LED light strip

LED light strips worked with 9V to 14 V DC. I used a separate 12V DC power supply to operate the LED light strips. Actually the monitor power supply had 12 V DC available, but I did not want to use the monitor’s power supply for the LED light strips.

LED power supply on the left

The three pictures below show the monitor hooked up to the computer. On the right hand side you can see the cables powering up the LED strips. In front of the monitor is the monitor power supply. Notice that the individual LED lights are visible at the bottom row of the monitor.

Hooked Up 1

Hooked Up 2

Hooked Up 3

My biggest problem while hooking up the monitor was that the computer recognized the monitor as ‘Unknown Monitor’ and set the maximum resolution to 1024×768. This was the highest resolution available in monitor settings. But my monitor’s native setting was 1280×1024. So I found out another difference between Fedora Core 10 (FC10) and version 14 (FC14). FC10 will use the xorg.conf file located in /etc/X11 directory, but FC14 dynamically sets the video parameters.

I created the following xorg.conf file that worked with FC10 and gave me a range of resolutions. Notice the HorizSync and VertRefresh rates are given as ranges of values.

However, the exact same file did not work with FC14. I had to put separate ModeLine’s for each resolution setting. These values are available from the X server log file in /var/log/Xorg.0.log file. After I did that I was able to use the monitor in its native resolution of 1280×1024. The modified xorg.conf file below worked with FC14.